PlayStation 4 Wiki Guide

PlayStation 4 Hard Drive Speed Test Comparison

The PS4 affords owners with the opportunity to upgrade the system's built-in hard drive for larger, faster variants. Sony mandates that the drive is no taller than 9.5mm and has a capacity of at least 160GB, but within those confines, you're free to use any consumer-grade internal drive.

However, before you go dropping considerable amounts of cash on an expensive SSD drive, you may want to weigh the cost as compared to the speed benefits. To help advise you on your PS4 storage quest, we ran some tests on the stock drive, an SSHD, and a SSD.

The results indicate that a hybrid SSHD drive can deliver many of the benefits of a traditional SSD but at a considerably lower cost. Although the SSD offered the best speeds in most cases, the SSHD only fell a few seconds shy of its scores, but both offer notably speed increases over the stock drive.

It's important to note that when it comes to disc-based game installs and boot-up times, all of the storage solutions are bottlenecked by the speed of the disc drive, whereas level loads and overall system boot-up time see significant gains from a SSD or SSHD. Games purchased through the PSN and stored entirely on local storage, like Resogun, see performance gains across the board.

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In short, a SSHD hybrid drive provides the speed improvements of a traditional SSD, but greater affordability and total storage capacity.